Updated M/W/F

Thanksgiving 2012 Gaming

I’ve blogged about this more than once in 1up, but I’ve always seen Thanksgiving as a great time for local multiplayer gaming, what with visiting family and all. That’s kind of been in decline though what with big current generation games prioritizing online over local multiplayer. I still like posting these Thanksgiving gaming blogs though just to see how other people deal with it.

For starters I have a feeling Nintendo deliberately released the Wii U in North America just in time for Thanksgiving. Their advertising campaign for the console came kinda late, but if they can get launch adopters to show the thing to visiting family members, it could get a lot of word of mouth. Wii Sports has often been a hit at any family gathering, and I’m hearing even better things about NintendoLand. Not only that, but New Super Mario Bros. U and Call of Duty are also four players (Black Ops II actually has four-player splitscreen in Zombies mode). On that subject, I haven’t heard anything about Madden or FIFA for the Wii U post-launch.

In my particular situation though I think that if any gaming happens it’ll be of the fighting variety — my brother almost routinely wipes me out in Street Fighter during family occasions. I’m also kind of surprised at how many fighting games came out in 2012 — near the end of a long console generation that has seen a massive revival in the genre. This year alone we’ve had Skullgirls, Street Fighter X Tekken, Dead or Alive 5, the English version of Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown, and Persona 4 Arena.

Outside of multiplayer I’ve just started to use these last weeks of the year to finish up all the games that I think are most worth finishing. More specifically I’m trying to cut down the best of my 2012 release backlog while also trying not to add to it too much this holiday season.

BULLETS:

That might’ve just gotten harder with all the reviews Far Cry 3 is getting: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=500804 It’s starting to sound like exactly the improvements I wanted coming off of the previous game, which I loved despite its serious problems.

Well this looks like a cool adventure game coming out at the beginning of December: http://t.co/uCMzp2v3 From the guys who made Gemini Rue and starring the narrator dude from Bastion.